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Wednesday, 25 November 2015

Did John McDonnell really quote from Mao?

I listened open mouthed as John McDonnell, Labour's (current) Shadow Chancellor quoted from Mao's Little Red Book. It was only when I got home that I saw the video. Can you imagine the furore if a Conservative politician quoted form a right-wing genocidal dictator? This reminded me of something I wrote back in 2011.

'In the last few days I have seen two rather odd examples of the way
that a dictator considered a Communist can still be revered in a way
that Hitler could (quite rightly) not. Westminster University
is holding an exhibition called 'Poster Power: Images from Mao's China,
Then and Now' at its 309 Regents Street building. Here's the blurb:

'Posters
from Mao’s China exercise an enduring appeal to audiences across the
globe, more than sixty years after the events that produced them. They
are revisited in modern and contemporary Chinese art and commercial
design, and curated in exhibitions in China, the US and Europe.

So
why does imagery produced to support a revolutionary ideology half a
century ago continue to resonate with current Chinese and Western
audiences? What is the China we see between posters of the Mao years and
their contemporary consumerist reinventions? How do we explain the
diverse responses such imagery evokes? And what does the appeal of the
posters of Mao’s China tell us about the country’s ‘red legacy’?

Poster
Power explores some of these questions through setting up a visual
dialogue between posters produced between the 1950s and the 1970s and
their echoes in recent years. With posters from the University of
Westminster’s Chinese Poster Collection, Chinese video art, documentary
film, photographs, and contemporary items such as playing cards and
nightclub advertising, the exhibition invites viewers to explore the
posters’ ambiguities of appeal to their audiences. As visual reminders
of both autocratic rule and exuberant youthful idealism, they evoke
diverse responses, challenging the idea that Cultural Revolution poster
propaganda transmitted a single, transparent meaning. These posters’
capacity to inspire ambiguous responses opens up new narratives of what
remains a complex period of China’s recent past, and sheds light on its
changing significance in contemporary China.'

Why not
a word, nor even an allusion to the around 50 million people killed by
the Chinese regime since 1949? why not a mention of the many millions
tortured by the Chinese regime and forced to give up their
"intellectual" jobs to work on the land as "workers", would that not
have resonance for current students? Why not a mention of those killed
around Tienanmen Square? Why not a mention of the invasion of Tibet and
the destruction of so much Buddhist life? Why not a mention of the human
rights abuses that occurred around the Beijing Olympics?

The
other example was in an antique shop the other week where there was a
small number of photos of Chairman Mao in a case and nobody seemed to
think this was odd.

Can you imagine the furore if an
antique shop had a collection of Adolph Hitler images on display? Can
you imagine the protests if a British University held an exhibition of
posters from Nazi Germany and did not put them into context?

Adolph
Hitler's Nazi Germany killed around seven million people and the regime
is rightly abhorred. Mao's communist regime in China killed many many
more (as did Stalin's communist regime in the Soviet Union) and yet
there is hardly a word of protest in remembrance now. Schools teach the
evils of Nazism & the BBC raise the subject regularly, and quite
rightly so, but the equally (or more) evils of Mao and Stalin's
communist regimes are mentioned far less; why is that the case? Maybe it
is something to do with the backgrounds of a large proportion of the
BBC, Labour Party leadership and educational elite in this country; once
a Marxist, always a Marxist?'

Where in the World - visitors since 16 May 2009

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